Week 13 Readings

Both of these article, to me, seemed to have interesting similarities between them. They both addressed women's roles in the strive for justice but also mentioned how the media is the prime source of how these actions are interpreted. In Paul Amar's piece he reflects on the protests done in Egypt and how they have increased the "needed" U.S. military aid there. While the aid has done more harm than good, it was the media and Egypt's own national government for putting them into place. There's this overlaying idea of people giving gender roles and deciding where woman should be on the grand scheme of things and this is controlled by the government by influencing what the media hears and sees. Amar mentions the hired "gangs" from the slums of Egypt to divert the media away from the true intentions of a national protest and portray the muslim community in barbaric and inhumane ways. These representations were intentionally caused by Egypt's own government because they knew that Western  media sources would fall for it because of the preconceived stereotypes of what it means to be a Muslim in the world.

I didn't really understand why their government would do that but it was really messed up. From my interpretation of the piece, it seemed like a way to get help with becoming a developed country like America, in which case, Egypt had to create a reason for the U.S. Army to come in and "help" them out but it really just caused a lot of harm to innocent people. The U.S. didn't even properly investigate the situation because of how they view this community of people already and they used it as a way to control and justify what they were doing to these people in Egypt. Even when the women had an upper hand in their fight to justice and finally got laws that would incriminate sex offenders, their country used it as a control tactic and manipulated the facts to make the laws in the ways that would benefit them. They did this by creating harsh, but needed, consequences but took advantage of their power and started charging people with crimes that they didn't commit in order to get money.

The power has been manipulated and taken advantage of that their way of maintaining the idea that "women do need this help from these barbaric hyper-sexual men" has crippled women from making the progress that they need to and outs women in this place that they feel like they need to be in.

This is apparent in media even today. With the current events of the attacks in Paris, it is evident that the attackers are from Muslim communities and the media reports the issue as if Islam is to blame and generalizes these people under the same blanket of terrorists when in reality that's not the case. It's really agonizing to know that some people actually think that it's ok to do that. I'm not trying to say that somehow this was set up and a scam to put Muslims on the radar but I will say that the coverage of the media will issue an emergency that insinuates that all Muslims are a risk and use it as a way to justify their own barbaric acts, in retaliation of what happened, in the name of "protection."

All in all, it was a good read and very informative.